XP Pro freezes when Sata Hard Drive is plugged in,,, help

Hi Guys,
My windows XP Pro system has 2 IDE (400gb OS Loaded & 80gb) and 2 Sata drives (2x500gb). Up until yesterday evening the system functioned properly, however when I tried to shut down, the system stalled doing nothing so I closed down using the power switch.
I tried to boot the system and got stuck at the black Windows XP screen. I did all the registry restore and fixmbr etc, last night but got nowhere. This morning I started to unplug the hardware and found that one of my 500gb sata drives was causing the boot issue.
If I unplug the 500gb drive, the system functions as normal, however if I plug-in the sata cable using the hotplug method or when the system is down, XP just freezes.

What can I do to fix this problem? I'd like to at least recover the data from the drive.
Motherboard is a gigabyte M55plus, AMD 5000x2, 3gb ram.
thx

XP does not know how to handle a sata drive or the drivers for a sata drive. I have a laptop that uses sata drives and tried to install xp on it. It would not install because of this issue. My recommendation is to take out the sata drives.